He was trapped in his own body by motor neurone disease but on living with disability he said in an interview with the New York Times in May 2011,

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

Other things he has said I have collected into my top ten:

1. “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

2. “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

3. “Quiet people have the loudest minds.”

4. During an Oxford University Union speech in 2016, he said “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”

5. Talking about the importance of human potential in 1988, he told the German paper Der Spiegel: “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”

6. While giving an interview to USA TODAY, he said “We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”

7. “I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.”

8. “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

9. “Black holes aren’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up — there’s a way out.” he said during a lecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

10. As quoted in his book, ‘A Brief History of Time’, “There could be whole anti-worlds and anti-people made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your anti-self, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.”